Unbound

by Cara McKenna

Genres: Women's Fiction; Romance; Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

Merry's lost a lot recently-first her mother, then close to a hundred pounds. Feeling adrift, she strikes out in search of perspective. A three-week hike through the Scottish Highlands was supposed to challenge her new body and refocus her priorities, but when disaster strikes, she's forced to seek refuge in the remote home of a brooding, handsome stranger.



Rob exiled himself to the Highlands years ago, desperate to escape his own self-destruction. Haunted by regrets, he avoids human contact at all costs . . . but when Merry turns up injured, he can't very well run her off. And as he nurses her back to health, Rob can't resist his guest's sweet demeanor-or her flirtatious advances. The igniting passion between them rouses a secret appetite Rob has long struggled to keep hidden. But Merry craves nothing more than to help Rob surrender to his desires, and the journey draws the lovers into an entirely different kind of wilderness.

Release date: October 15, 2013

Publisher: InterMix

Print pages: 335

Sample

From: Merry

To: Lauren, Kat

Subject: Farewell drinks?

Hey gals! Anybody free for pre-vacay drinks tomorrow? I figure it’s pretty likely I’ll get taken captive as a sex slave by some rippling, kilted Highlander next week, never to return. Promise you’ll keep San Fran warm for me.

I’ve got a zillion things still to wrap up at work, but I should be free by 7:30. Any takers? So hoping to see you guys one more time before I fly out.

Mer

From: Lauren

To: Merry, Kat

Subject: re: Farewell drinks?

Wouldn’t miss it—I could use a drink this week. Or three. Just tell me where.

L

From: Kat

To: Merry, Lauren

Subject: re: Farewell drinks?

Hell yeah. See you then!

Kat

From: Lauren

To: Merry, Kat

Subject: re: Farewell drinks?

Is it totally cunty that I’m sort of looking forward to Merry being gone for a month? Probably. But I swear she lost her old personality, right along with the weight. If it gets any worse she’ll start tossing her hair and giggling every time someone tells her how great she looks. My last nerve. She is on it. Bon voyage.

Okay, yeah. That WAS cunty. Whatever. See you tomorrow!

Cuntily yours,

Lauren

Merry blinked at her phone’s screen, just as another message alert pinged.

From: Kat

To: Merry

Subject: re: Farewell drinks?

Uhhh . . . o_O I’m guessing Lauren didn’t mean to reply all. And I don’t think she knows she did. Shall we just let her keep thinking that, or . . . ??? Anyhow, I can’t wait to see you tomorrow!

Awkwardly,

Kat

Merry frowned, considering her reply.

She wasn’t hurt.

Well, yeah, she was. But not surprised. Lauren’s default setting was snide, but it stung Merry to have her suspicions confirmed. She’d lost ninety-two pounds, but clearly she’d gained something else—readmission to the joys of high-school bitchery! Nothing like a reply-all faux pas to make thirty-one feel like fifteen.

She squished the carpet between her bare toes, wiping her smudged screen with her sleeve. To confront or not to confront.

Lauren had told her once, “You can be fat, or you can be a bitch. But you can’t be a fat bitch. Bitchiness is a luxury only hot girls can afford.”

Merry hated that motto, but she still remembered it word for word, five or more years after Lauren had decreed it. As though a girl couldn’t be big and a bitch, and, for that matter, hot. Though sadly, it seemed perhaps a girl could not be Lauren’s best friend if she didn’tstay fat.

Which was a rather bitchy policy, Merry felt. Nearly as bitchy as that e-mail.

Was she more annoying now? She hadn’t thought so.

Like anyone on earth isn’t annoying, from time to time. And if she was chirpy and smiley when people complimented her, it was because her mom and had raised her to accept praise graciously, never to deflect or apologize. Save your deflecting for the insults—there’ll be plenty. Swallow the kind words whole.

Merry sighed, physically feeling the angst, forcing it from her body as she’d trained herself to do in lieu of muffling it with food.

Let Lauren sulk. Let her vent. Let her think Merry had turned traitor by veering off a comfortable, delicious collision course with diabetes or joint problems or whatever else she’d managed to ignore until last year.

Maybe Lauren would come around, in time. And if she didn’t, Merry might have to admit that perhaps Lauren was two hundred additional pounds she’d be well rid of.

Sucked, though—ten years of friendship, and she’d never noticed how codependent they’d been. Kind of like how she’d never quite realized she’d gotten so overweight, despite the numbers on her jeans tag and the scale giving it to her straight on a daily basis. People were nothing if not selective in their perceptions of reality.

She hit reply.

From: Merry

To: Lauren, Kat

Subject: re: Farewell drinks?

Awesome! Americano at 7:30. First round’s on me.

Mer

Yeah, awesome. Merry could be the bigger man . . . even if she was now the smaller girl. She’d broken some unspoken, fat-girl solidarity pact she’d subconsciously entered into with Lauren. She could forgive the woman for feeling betrayed or abandoned.

Though, yeah. It was pretty cunty.

She turned to the catastrophe that was her living room, strewn with three weeks’ hiking supplies she had to magically clown-car into one pack. She lined items up by necessity—tent, sleeping bag, water filter on the front line. Essential clothes, followed by if-there’s-room clothes . . .

Friends love each other, she thought, checking the caps on her travel bottles. Friends hurt each other. Friends came and went, but Merry had already lost a lot in the past year and a half. Her mother, over a third of her body weight, then her . . . Well, not her boyfriend. Her fuck buddy. Jason had quit texting a few months ago, right around the time Merry had spun giddy circles in a department-store dressing room after the zipper had slid home, practically dancing out into the street carrying her first size-twelve dress, with a side of intoxicating confidence.

Magically, a few weeks later, she’d had to take that dress to a consignment shop—it was too big now. After this vacation, she might need to do the same with her tens. Holy shit. Size eight. The single digits. She might actually one day fit into the sample sizes she patterned at work. Shangri-fucking-la.

The weird thing was, she still felt like the old Merry inside—caring, competent, fun, loyal. But now people were reacting differently to the package those qualities came in. Guys from work who’d never said more to her than, “How do you change the toner in this thing?” were suddenly asking about her weekend, her vacation, her opinions on the latest reality-TV scandal.

While part of her was thrilled—male attention was a side effect of the weight loss she’d been hoping for, after all—another part had to think, Caring, fun and loyal don’t really count for much, do they? Not unless they came wrapped in a pleasing female shape. Not if you wanted to get past the proverbial receptionist with a guy. Which kind of sucked.

And yet . . . she did want that. Thirty-one, and she’d never been in love. She’d been infatuated, sure. She’d been in love in a guy’s general direction, but she’d never felt that light and heat shining back on her. She’d been clad too heavily in her own self-consciousness to welcome it. Some women wore their curves proudly—rocked the hell out of them, in fact. But that had never been Merry. Her extra weight had been defensive, something to hide behind, not to embrace.

Now the armor was gone. She felt exposed, but the sensation was as thrilling as it was scary. And if she ever wanted to get tangled in the writhing tentacles of passionate, mind-blowing, stupid-making, reciprocal true love, she’d have to make peace with this naked feeling.

Perhaps Lauren, like Jason, had preferred the old Merry, the Merry who’d bent over backward to please the people she liked, who’d put herself last.

You’re welcome to her, she thought, stuffing her sleeping bag into its sleeve.

This new Merry’s off to walk across Scotland.

And she’s not coming back until she’s fucking found herself.

She was a water nymph. A weightless, ethereal goddess of the loch.

A mattress of undulating coolness under her back, sunshine heating her breasts and belly and face. With her ears submerged, her pulse became the very heartbeat of the earth, the cascade of her hair dancing in the gentle waves. She was more spirit than flesh, a wisp of pure energy to be blown where the breeze wished to take her . . .

But the cold got her first. Her feet found the smooth stones and mush, bracing autumn air clenching her back muscles. Weightlessness going, going, gone as she sloshed to shore.

The water nymph was no more, and she was just Merry. Same old Merry, still thumbing through the owner’s manual for this body she couldn’t yet call her own.

The breeze pebbled her dripping skin as she tiptoed between the sharper rocks to her towel—a towel that was in desperate need of a good machine-washing after more than two weeks’ trekking.

As she dried herself, she took in the landscape, thinking she’d never felt this small before—a smallness that had nothing to do with her dress size or body mass index. Those measures felt so abstract now.

The valleys of northwest Scotland were sweeping, the craggy black mountains grand and ominous, the loch long and wide, wavering like old glass under a vast blue sky. She was well off the popular Great Glen Way route, and the only sign of humanity she’d spied in the past several days had been the ribbon of white smoke rising from the chimney of a holiday cottage she’d passed early that morning.

Once dressed in her hiking pants and a zip-up, she perched on a boulder to tug on thick wool socks. The rock poked rudely into her butt, and she nearly missed her old padding. Two weeks’ backpacking had probably rounded up her total weight loss since the previous summer to a tidy hundred pounds.

She’d fantasized about the day she’d hit that lovely round number. One hundred freaking pounds.

In her imagination, she’d risen at a pious hour just after dawn, stepped on the scale, clasped her hands with rapturous delight, then skipped down the hall to celebrate the accomplishment with exactly three-quarters of a cup of high-fiber cereal and exactly one-half cup of soy milk, a breakfast that—in her fantasy—she’d magically come to find both palatable and satisfying. 220 calories. Write that down. 220—that’s sixteen minutes on the treadmill at 6.2 miles per hour. That’s twenty-one minutes on the elliptical, excluding warm-up, at 115 strides per minute at a 7.5 resistance.

Fucking numbers.

In her imagination, after said breakfast she’d head to work. She’d take a long lunch break that day, and under the flattering lights of the J. Crew changing room she’d discover she did indeed fit into a pair of size eight jeans. Jeans for which she’d pay ninety dollars—more numbers, always numbers—smiling as she signed the receipt, dutifully not thinking about the working conditions of Cambodian children.

Reality looked nothing like her expectations. The past two weeks’ journey had changed all her perceptions, finally plugging her into an authentic model for qualifying all these changes. Dozens of miles she never could’ve hiked in her old body. Steep hills she never could have scaled and views she’d never have glimpsed from their peaks. The feel of the wind or the weak autumn sun on her naked skin. This sensation of perfect solitude. This mirrorlessness, with no one’s eyes on her body, not even her own. To relate to her physicality from the inside, through what she could do, not how she looked.

The numbers didn’t matter. The numbers were just markers people used to convince themselves how much better or worse they were than others, to calculate their relative human worth.

In no time at all this trip would be over, and in no time at all, Merry might be back to giving a shit about the markers. Those rituals may have whittled the equivalent of a fifth grader from her frame, but that compulsive level of vigilance wasn’t sustainable. Plus Merry had tasted of the bacon-wrapped scallop, the fried pickle with ranch, the brownie batter never to see the inside of an oven. She’d been tossed too many years ago from the garden where there grew only carrot sticks and hundred-calorie packs of pretzels, and there was no readmittance. Her mouth had lain in sin with too many Reubens.

For now, no food diary. No logging her day’s cardio session. For as long as she was out here, the numbers could go fuck themselves.

The numbers back home said Merry’s daily calorie budget was 1,450. She smiled, opening a bag of cashews, eating them by the handful as she watched the breeze rippling the loch. She’d surely blast past the 1,450 mark on these alone, inside five minutes. Yet she’d burn them off by noon, humping her forty-pound pack over hill and dale, tugging up her too-big hiking pants when they slipped low and chafed her recently excavated hip bones.

Out here, her body wasn’t a collection of desirable parts and shameful ones, a thing to be tricked and punished and outsmarted, outwilled. It was merely a vessel for food and water and sunshine, a structure of muscle and bone, a capable and ready thing. A machine primed for this trip—170 miles on foot, nearly three weeks to ponder all this natural beauty and appreciate her success. Numbers that qualified her efforts instead of tallying her female value.

She wrapped her hair in the towel and lay across a smooth stretch of grass, surrendering to the smallness. Leaving her body behind as she shut her eyes and welcomed the sun’s heat.

Two hours later, the cramps started.

***

It began as stabby pangs just beneath her ribs and a roiling in her stomach. She’d had to scrap the day’s miles, hiking at a staggered pace back to the loch, lest she get stranded too far from a water source. The pains were followed by a long night of taunting half-sleep, of unsettling, looping dreams, twisted by a growing nausea.

Merry longed to vomit—surely it’d make this hounding dizziness go away—but that mercy never came. The crisis moved to her bowels by dawn, and that didn’t quell the queasiness, either.

The cramps sharpened and a headache grew, and no matter how much water she drank, thirst dogged her. When her bottles were empty, the simple effort of crouching and pumping the filter made her muscles ache and her limbs tremble.

Something was seriously wrong, and it probably wasn’t just the too-many dried apricots she’d had for lunch the day before.

The little crofter’s cottage she’d passed the previous dawn couldn’t be far—two miles, tops. Sadly, the route was uphill, and her pack felt as though it were filled with cinder blocks. It hurt where the straps bound her, so badly she felt she must be bruising. Dehydration made her light-headed, lining her mouth with cotton and chapping her lips. She focused on each step, trying to lure her mind off the discomfort.Right, left. Right, left. She hummed cheery pop songs, punctuated by low moans each time a cramp twisted her guts.

“Fucking fuck.”She hugged her middle, gnashing her teeth through the latest pang.

Perhaps a mile up the hill, she dropped to her knees, toppled by the weight of the pack, muscles too spent to catch her. Her palm found a rock and was rewarded with a bloody scrape. The impact had barely hurt at all. And that didn’t feel right.

She made it to her feet, reeling.

Not even a hundred yards on, she fell a second time, tripping on a sharp outcropping veiled by the wild grass. This time it was her head that found the rock.

White flashed. The pain didn’t follow for five seconds or more, but when it did, she cried out. As the dancing spots blinked away, Merry lurched onto her side, fumbling with shaking fingers to unsnap the buckles at her waist and chest. The pack tumbled aside, feeling like half a ton of dead weight. She touched her temple. Her fingers came away red and slick.

That’s not good.

I’m going to die out here. And I’ve never even been in love.

God, that was too pathetic. Too pathetic to accept, frankly.

For a time—a minute, an hour, a day, who knew—she stared into the hard blue sky and listened to the river rushing, waiting for her limbs to re-materialize and her brain to quiet, for panic to make room for calm. When it did, she struggled to her knees and detached the plastic whistle fob from her backpack and gathered a water bottle and compass. Before striking out from Glasgow she’d bought a GPS tracker, a clip-on device that she now moved from her bag to her pants pocket. It wouldn’t do much aside from lend her a vague sense that she was still tethered to some human being, someplace. And if she perished out here, well, they might just find her before the crows did.

With that cheerful thought, she started back up the hill.

Yesterday the cottage had seemed no more than forty-five minutes’ hike. She should have come upon it by now, surely. Or was panic making a snail’s pace feel like a sprint?

But finally, after seeming hours—stone walls, red door. A tiny house no bigger than her apartment appearing beyond the rise.

“Thank you thank you thank you . . .”

A spasm of nausea curled her body. She groaned until it passed, sucking desperate breaths through clenched teeth. Her arm ached as she dug the whistle from her pocket and brought it to her parched lips. She blew. Barely a wheeze at first, but she puffed into it with every step, the cottage growing closer, closer. She’d make it. She might have to crawl, but she’d make it.

The blowing triggered a head rush, and a hundred paces from the little home, she fell to her knees again. Her temple wailed as she got back up, but something else screamed—anger. Panic. Frustration, that no one had heard her and opened the door. Had she imagined that smoke?

No, someone maintained this place. The thatch on the roof was too tame, a broom leaning against the doorframe not weathered enough to have been abandoned here. It must be a holiday cottage. Please don’t let its renters have picked yesterday to head home . . .

“Hello?” she shouted, staggering the final few yards. Her fist thumped the heavy wooden door with a rattle, compounding the ache in her arm. She pounded and shouted, the impact as weak as her voice. “Hello! Please! I’m hurt.”

An aluminum sign was hung to her left, the kind you might buy at a hardware store. No Soliciting. Too exhausted to make sense of it, she put her lips to the whistle and mustered a mighty breath just as the door swung in.

The man clapped his hands to his ears, wincing. Merry was so startled she let the fob fall from her lips. Blue eyes widened, aimed at her bleeding head.

“Hello,” she said dumbly, feeling drunk, stabbed in the guts at random intervals by the cramps, stabbed in the temple by her throbbing cut. “I may be dying. I’m not sure.”

The door opened wider. A dark-haired man was steering her inside, around a corner. Something hard slammed into her butt and legs—a chair seeming to rise up from the floor to collide with her body. She gripped the seat at her sides with both hands, convinced it was floating, that she’d flip over and tumble off if she didn’t hold tight. She wanted to lie down. On the nice, solid floor, where maybe the world would stop rocking this way. She tried to slide her butt from the seat, but the stranger stopped her, pinning her shoulders.

“No, no. Stay put.”

“I need to lie down.”

“You can’t. You’ve had a nasty knock on the head.” He crouched before her, hand still clamped firmly to her shoulder. Gently drawing back the skin above and below her lids, he peered at her eyes. “You’ve not got double vision, have you?”

“No, just a terrible headache. And everything’s spinning. And I’m nauseous.”

He continued to scan her eyes with his blue ones. Gray-blue like the lochs, and the autumn sky just before dusk, Merry mused, still feeling drunk. Cold like slate, hard and sharp. His overgrown hair untamed, like the wild heather. Whoa, deep.

The man covered her eyes with his warm hands, then took them away. “Your pupils are good.” The scent of tea sweetened his breath. God knew what hers smelled of.

He’s hot, she thought idly, a thought so inappropriate given the circumstances, she chalked it up to the head injury.

Some clarity returned as she caught her breath, and the room slowly ceased tumbling. She managed to accept a mug of cold water and emptied half of it. It seemed to douse the steam fogging her brain, though the nausea and piercing headache remained.

The man took the mug and set it on a small table at her side, crouching once more.

“Hold still.” He pushed back her hair to examine whatever damage the fall had done. She studied his face as he assessed her injury, trying to make sense of him after all these days of perfect isolation.

His stubble was flirting with beardhood, black save for a patch of silver below his lip, and she guessed he was about forty. He had a deep pair of creases between his brows and another set bracketing his mouth—stern and steely things. There was less gray in his dark hair, but a healthy streaking at his temples. His expression was hard, but whether it was his typical look or merely one he reserved for shrill, bleeding hikers who barged babbling into his cottage . . .

No matter how stern or scowly he might be, no matter if Merry was concussed, it didn’t diminish her initial assessment. He was hot. Strong nose, distrustful blue eyes. Sort of down-and-out, rugged hotness, like a sexy, desperate fugitive. Which might explain the whole living-in-the-middle-of-nowhere thing. In any case, he didn’t look like a man on vacation.

But definitely hot.

Maybe he’ll rip his shirt to pieces, to make bandages for my head.

Oh shit, I am so hard up.

“Stay there.” The man stood and disappeared into the next room.

Merry looked around. She was in a combination kitchen and den, with a wood stove in the center, shelves with pots and pans and dishes at her end, a rocking chair at the other. The space was lit coolly by the light coming through a single window.

Her mysterious host returned with a metal first-aid box and a wet washcloth. He rolled the sleeves of his thermal shirt to his elbows. “Turn your head.”

She let him swab her temple, first with water, then with some stinging wipe. “Ow ow ow.”

“That’s quite a bump you’ve got.” His thumb circled the spot.

“Ow—yes.”

“But you don’t need stitches at least.” He smeared the cut with ointment and smoothed a broad bandage in place. He sat back on his heels, expression softening by a measure. “I’ve gotten tape in your hair. Sorry.”

Merry gave the dressing a faint press. “That’s okay. What about my hand?” She held it out, palm crusted maroon with dried blood.

He took it in his own hand and wiped it clean, revealing only shallow scrapes. She stared at his mouth as the antiseptic wipe burned across the savaged skin, concentrating on the tight line of his lips until the sting faded.

“Probably not worth the trouble of wrapping,” he said, letting her hand go.

“No, probably not. Thank you.”

He backed off, resting his forearms on his knees. “What are you doing out here, wandering around with no supplies?”

“I’ve got a whole pack of stuff, but I had to ditch it when I got dizzy. It’s down the hill a ways. I, um . . . Where’s your bathroom? I should know, just in case. I’m pretty nauseous.”

He stood and went to a cupboard, returning with a large metal bowl and setting it on her lap.

“Or that could work.”

“The bathroom’s not exactly en suite.”

Her bowels had settled, at least. “Thanks.”

“Has the fall made you nauseous?”

“No, I’ve been queasy since last night, and dizzy. I hit my head when I tripped.” She touched the spot.

“Have you been drinking loch water?”

“Only filtered.”

“Have you been keeping it down?”

Merry shook her head. “Not really. Not since yesterday afternoon.”

“Want to hazard some tea?”

“Sure.” Maybe something hot would trick her body into a sense of calm.

The man went to his stove, lighting a fire in its belly and centering a kettle on top. He gathered her mug plus another and a jar of loose tea, and tidied the small kitchen area as he waited for the water to steam, seeming eager to ignore Merry. When kettle finally whistled, he filled a perforated, hinged spoon with tea and snapped it closed.

“I haven’t got any milk in,” he said.

“That’s fine. I shouldn’t push it, anyhow.”

“Sugar?”

“Please. Are you sure I can’t lie down?”

“I don’t think so. Not if you’re concussed.”

“I think I’m just not supposed to fall asleep.”

“Since neither of us seems to know for sure, let’s err on the side of caution.” His tone had gone a touch sharp, and he had a different accent than the ones she’d heard in the last village she’d passed through. Not as brogue-y as folks in Glasgow or further north, but harder than the gentle, civilized tones of the Edinburgh natives she’d encountered.

As he stirred, his blue eyes seemed to ask the mug, Why? Why? Why?

Merry was chatty at the best of times, and out here, having not seen or spoken to anyone for four or five days, she couldn’t help herself. “This is all very strange. I feel drunk.”

He nodded, not looking up.

“I hope I haven’t wrecked your vacation.”

“I live here.”

Aha. “Year-round?”

“Yes.”

Damn. “Just you?”

“Just me.”

“Have you been out here long?”

“About two years.” Still no eye contact.

“Did you grow up nearby?”

“Leeds.”

“Oh, you’re English. I was like, man, what a weird Scottish accent he’s got.”

He raised his eyes to meet hers, and in that split second she imagined she could read his thoughts: Bugger me, is she going to chatter like this all bloody day?

She drummed her fingers around the bowl. “Sorry. You know, for intruding this way.”

“I’m sure it wasn’t intentional.” Not the warmest reassurance, but fine. “How’s your stomach?”

“Still queasy. But stabilizing, I think. Or maybe I’m just not so dizzy. So are you retired, or . . . ?”

“Yes, I suppose I am.”

From what? And how, so young? And why do you live like a hermit? What’s your deal? Are you a serial killer? “Well, you’ve picked a very . . .” Remote. Lonely. Secluded. Murder-conducive. “A very majestic place. To retire.”

He nodded. For a long, awkward moment they stared at each other, and Merry wondered which of them felt more confused by the other.

“My name’s Merry, by the way. Spelled like Merry Christmas.” A jolly name she’d lived up to, in temperament and, until recently, plumpness. When her host didn’t respond, the silence made her antsy. “What’s your name?”

“Rob.”

“Nice to meet you, Rob. I mean, this isn’t so nice, how it happened. But you know.”

Rob forced an unpracticed smile that suggested he didn’t find a single thing about their acquaintance in any way nice.

She plowed on regardless, dreading silence more than she feared annoying him. “I’m from San Francisco, just backpacking through.”

“On a gap year?”

“A what?”

“A break. From university?”

“Oh no, I’m thirty-one. I’m just on vacation. My mom grew up in Inverness, and I’ve never been, so . . .” She cut herself off, knowing she’d spew on endlessly if given half a chance. I just lost a hundred pounds, you see, and my mom died last year, and I have no fucking clue what I’m doing with my life or what I want, and I suspect this guy I’ve been banging ditched me for losing the weight, and I think my best friend is next. “I don’t really know why I’m walking there, to be honest. I guess I wanted a challenge.”

After a long pause, Rob submitted to the small talk with what looked like a considerable effort. “How far?”

“Glasgow to Inverness.”

He blinked. “That’s a ways.”

“I was on track to do it in under three weeks, but I hadn’t planned on contracting whatever this is. I hope it’s just some flu, from all the camping, and being so worn out. Thank goodness I noticed your cottage yesterday.”

Rob didn’t echo her relief over this point, but instea